rhyming stuart little with stuart little

This isn't a diss to those people. I just wanted everyone to know the Road Wiz is an ally ❤🧡💛💚💙💜

When I see fictional characters do something violent or abusive, but the narrative doesn't frame it as a problem, I do tend to feel uncomfortable and assume the author thinks it would be okay in real life.

My dad once tried to explain what I think this post is trying to say: when I once expressed discomfort about how often women slap men in fiction, he said that in most of those cases, the slap is "symbolic." I wasn't convinced, because how can it be symbolic when there's no doubt that in-universe, she literally does it?

But of course I understand that fiction has conventions, where we know it's not realistic but we accept it anyway. For example, the convention of Love at First Sight: we know it rarely if ever happens in real life, but sometimes in fiction, two characters need to fall in love but the writers don't want to waste time making it happen realistically. Or the tradition of death scenes in which the dying person is fully alert, mobile, and talkative to the very end: we know it's unrealistic, but the person's final feelings need to be expressed. So I guess we should sometimes think of casual, uncriticized violence and bad behavior in fiction in the same way. We're not supposed to think a decent or emotionally healthy person would do it in real life, it's just a convention to fully express the character's anger.

For example, Elphaba and Glinda's catfight in Act II of Wicked and in the movie Wicked: For Good. I've always hated it and been disturbed by how casually it's treated, both by the narrative and by the fans. The fandom celebrates Elphaba and Glinda's bond as one of the greatest and most beautiful examples of a deep friendship between two female characters (or, more popularly, of a lesbian love story in which both ladies are in the closet), and either way, as one of the most glorious, moving examples of love in all of musical theatre. And yet not only are they pitted against each other in a love triangle, but at the eleventh hour, they get into a violent catfight over their rivalry for Fiyero's affections, in which they slap each other, and then try to full-out beat each other up, first as a duel with their broom and wand, then bare-handed on the ground. And it's played for laughs. And the fans don't care either: they just treat it as a silly little lovers' spat and talk about how funny and "homoerotic" it is.

But maybe what I didn't understand until now is that we're not supposed to view the fight realistically. It's not the same as two real women slapping and attacking each other, it's just a cathartic device to let them vent out their negative feelings – not just their rivalry over Fiyero, or Elphaba's outrage that Glinda gave her dead sister's shoes to a stranger, but all their ideological differences too, and all the mutual envy and competition that society has fostered between them from the start – so they can reconcile in the end with no tension left. And maybe the fans wouldn't think it was okay in real life, but in a musical they can see it as funny, sexy, and part of the healing process, because they know that Elphaba and Glinda aren't real people, they're just constructions to make us feel things.

I wonder if another example, or at least a partial one, might be King Triton's destruction of Ariel's grotto in Disney's The Little Mermaid. Now of course, this act is framed as a terrible thing, which drives Ariel straight into Ursula's trap. I've read plenty of thoughtful, valid analysis of the movie that discusses Triton as an abusive father. But here's the problem, which I've written about before: I don't think the movie really frames him as an abusive father. A flawed father, yes. An overly strict and controlling father who needs to learn to let Ariel be free, yes. But not an outright abuser. His motive is fear for Ariel's safety, because he thinks humans are cruel and dangerous, and we're obviously meant to feel sympathy for him and see him as redeemable. And yet... how can we call a scene where a father viciously destroys all his daughter's most prized possessions anything but abuse?

Maybe, to an extent, this is another scene we should view as "symbolic." The audience just needs a big, dramatic display of Triton's rage and intolerance, bigger than what words can convey, to make it clear to Ariel that he'll never accept her love for the human world and especially not her love for Eric. And if we're supposed to forgive him for that incident more easily than we might forgive a real, human father, it's because he's not a real, human father, he's an animated merman.